


with spider legs and pretty bows

by callunavulgari



Series: Dark Month Collection [31]
Category: Kingdom Hearts, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Genre: Arachnophobia, Body Horror, Horror, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-07
Updated: 2013-10-07
Packaged: 2017-12-28 16:32:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/994105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He allows his eyes to slide back open and she gasps a little. “Oh, what pretty eyes you have,” she sighs, and the sound it makes is like leaves swirling in the wind. “You’re a very pretty spider.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	with spider legs and pretty bows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darthvair65](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthvair65/gifts).



> Dark Month, Day 6. This one is cutting it close, but I've been in Sandusky all day for Nick's nephews birthday. The three hour drive there and back was killer. The rain made it worse, since we tried to wait out the storm. Anyhow, Jen wanted Axel and Roxas visiting Halloweentown during Days, so that's what happened. Also, I feel the need to mention that though I'm not squeamish about spiders, researching them for this made me squirm. Roxas is a net-weaving spider, one of the only spiders that legitimately have decent vision.

The smells are strange, everything just slightly off, like something’s in the process of going bad in the fridge but you don’t know _what_ yet.  
  
Roxas blinks his eyes open, and his stomach flip-flops.  
  
His vision swirls, the world whirling around impossibly, his eyes refusing to focus. The colors are wrong, he thinks, the world a smear of orange and black. He blinks, rapidly, despite the vertigo threatening to knock him sideways, and when that still doesn’t work, he whimpers and shuts his eyes.  
  
It takes him a long time to realize that the reason the world is blurring into strange colors is because his vision is currently eight-fold. It takes him even longer to figure out how to work his eyes—how to make the swirling images settle into something that vaguely resembles reality. By then, he’s already groping around blindly, calling Axel’s name.   
  
It doesn’t take long for somebody to find him. Unfortunately, that person is not Axel.  
  
“Hello,” someone whispers. It’s a girl’s voice, he thinks, but it’s thin and crinkly like paper, soft enough that he can barely hear her.  
  
He squints and can just barely make out a dark figure—a smear of _redorangeblue_ that makes his eyes hurt. “I’ve never seen you before,” the voice goes on, and he hears someone crouching next to him. “Are you hurt?”  
  
He blinks again, but the world is still refusing to make any sense. “Hey,” he tries to say, but it comes out garbled and strange, like there’s something blocking the words. Something drips down his chin, wet and viscous. When he tries to lick his lips, his tongue feels like sandpaper.  
  
The girl giggles, a thin, lilty sound that makes him think of the haunting lullabies Demyx sings when he thinks no one’s listening. “You’re funny. It’s like you just got your fangs! You’re too big to have just hatched though.”  
  
He’s sick of blinking, so he shuts his eyes tight and leaves them that way. Fangs? Hatched? Where the hell did Axel even take him?  
  
“Where am I?” he asks, shaping the words carefully. They still come out garbled, but she apparently understands this time, because she laughs again.  
  
“Halloweentown, of course,” she replies, like _c’mon silly_. He doesn’t know of any Halloweentown—it hasn’t been in any of the mission reports, but Axel _had_ said that he was taking him somewhere new.  
  
“Have you seen my friend?” he tries to ask, with only moderate success. He has to repeat himself three times, liquid dribbling down his chin every time he tries to speak. Something sounds like it’s hissing and when he pats the street (cobblestones? he thinks, but the shapes all wrong) he realizes that the liquid splashing there is eating away at the stone, like acid.   
  
There’s another strange sound, like paper ripping, and she hums. “You’re the only stranger I’ve seen,” she says, and the sound comes again, that same crinkled, ripped paper. He allows his eyes to slide back open and she gasps a little. “Oh, what pretty eyes you have,” she sighs, and the sound it makes is like leaves swirling in the wind. “You’re a very pretty spider.”  
  
He needs to find a mirror, he thinks, because this is entirely too much. Before he can say something of the sort though, a hissing starts up, not the way it had before, when the the very stone was being eaten away. This time is different, like so many snakes.  
  
“Oh!” the girl says, sounding startled. “You must be his friend!”  
  
Axel laughs, because it must be Axel, but there’s something off about that laugh. It’s scratchy and grating, like his vocal cords have been chewed on. “You’ve found my spider,” he sing-songs, and that’s not right either. “Thank you, Miss Muppet.”  
  
“It’s Sally,” the girl corrects gently, and there’s a whoosh of displaced air, as if Axel has swept into a bow.   
  
“Sally then. Thank you, I’ve been looking for him all over.”  
  
More rustling, but when he squints again, the only difference is that now another smear of _orangeredgray_ has joined the first. Something claps him on the back, and he crumbles a little, even though he’s still sitting—he’s going to smack straight into the weird not-cobblestone streets.  
  
The hand—he hopes it’s a hand—stays there, in the center of his back, stroking (again) what he hopes to be a finger up and down his spine.   
  
The girl giggles again, and Roxas is pretty sure she’s getting to her feet, because her voice sounds farther away. “Well, I’ll leave you to him then. Don’t scare him too much, after all, too much fear is bad for you,” she remarks, and there’s the sound of footsteps, and oddly, a strange whimpering.  
  
She must turn back to them, because the next thing he knows she’s calling, “You two make quite the horrifying couple,” and laughs one last time, like she’s just given them a compliment.   
  
Axel though, just laughs along with her, and possibly (hopefully) strokes his cheek. “Why thank you, Miss Sally. I’ve seen you and Jack around, and trust me, the two of you are much more horrifying.”  
  
She’s blushing, he thinks.   
  
Then she’s gone, and Axel is letting him go and sighing.   
  
“What am I gonna do with you, Roxas?” he breathes.  
  
.  
  
He wishes he hadn’t found a mirror. Or maybe hadn’t figured out how to work his eyes.  
  
The girl’s comments make sense now. But he isn’t a pretty spider—he’s horrifying.   
  
Torso-wise, he’s much the same, save the coloring. Hips and up his body’s gone a strange, dusky brown color, fine hairs covering him all over. His hair’s gone the same brown-gray, and it’s stiffer than usual, like it isn’t quite hair anymore.   
  
He doesn’t have blue eyes either—what’s more, he has _eight_ beady black eyes. Four of them are relatively small, but the other four are larger. The main pair, which are where his human eyes would have been, are enormous and silvery-blue when they catch the light. The eyes are horrifying enough, but the fangs are worse.  
  
At least he knows why he’d been having trouble talking—his mouth is hardly suited for human speech anymore, dwarfed by an enormous pair of dripping fangs. God, he doesn’t even know if the thing in his mouth is even technically a tongue anymore.  
  
Hips down, he’s even less human. His body is segmented weird, thorax and abdomen, like a normal spider, and there are eight spindly legs in addition to his two relatively human arms. He shivers, looking at himself, and Axel leans in close to him, peering into the mirror beside him. Roxas can feel the heat coming from him—because that’s another thing—Axel’s hair is fire. So are his eyebrows. His eyes are poison bright—a green like acid and venom and toxic waste combined—and his flesh is… falling off. He has to keep catching bits of himself and sewing them back on.  
  
“You’re looking terrifying,” he quips, patting Roxas on what he can’t unsee as his giant spider butt. His fangs twitch along with two of his legs, and unbidden, he starts spinning silk, those two front legs starting to weave some kind of… net together.  
  
“I think you should probably back away from me,” he growls, venom dripping from his fangs and onto his chest, eating away at the fabric. Axel snorts, but does end up moving away.  
  
“I don’t like this place,” he says, trying to step away from the mirror. He ends up scurrying twelve steps in the other direction and dizzyingly, he wonders if this is what it feels like to be drunk. He wonders if nobodies can get drunk. Probably.  
  
Axel laughs at him, clapping a hand into his not-hair and ruffling it until Roxas starts clicking his fangs at him. “But it’s Halloween,” Axel wheedles, voice still that strange mixture of torn and shredded. “This place does Halloween better than anywhere else.”  
  
“So I see,” Roxas whispers, attention caught by some… _thing_ walking by. His legs itch, his fangs dribble venom, and helpless, he can only watch as his legs propel him forward, ensnaring the creature in it’s weird silk neck.   
  
“Please help me,” he calls, his legs busily entangling the creature further in the net as it squeals. His fangs itch and his senses are all over the place—his not-belly rumbling. “I really don’t want to eat whatever this is.”  
  
Axel laughs again, but comes over anyway, keeping his body far out of reach of Roxas’ fangs as he untangles the helpless creature.  
  
“Ugh, you’re sticky,” Axel says as the creature bounds away, squalling.  
  
Part of Roxas is absurdly disappointed, instincts hissing that he just let something take away his prey. “Please take me home now,” Roxas whispers, fangs clicking in Axel’s direction. Please.  
  
Axel sighs. “I haven’t even gotten the chance to introduce you to Jack or deadly nightshade shots in a pub that smells like the crypt. We could go see the great lich worm mother and you won’t even go mad like this. We could watch the skeleton crew dance!”  
  
“Please, Axel,” he whispers.  
  
Axel sighs again, and before Roxas can blink, he’s pressing a quick kiss to the flat part of Roxas’ fangs. Venom smears across his lips and Roxas watches the flesh sizzle away, revealing bones, cartilage, and rotting teeth. He still doesn’t have a heart, but something strange blossoms in his chest cavity anyway—something warm, like watching Axel’s flesh melt for the sake of a kiss is the most romantic thing that’s ever happened—the monster part of him overtaking his human brain.  
  
“Axel,” he presses, half-hysterical, because he’s spinning another net, and he’s mostly sure that this one is for Axel.  
  
“Fine, fine,” Axel grouses with his ruined face.   
  
The smile he flashes Roxas is horrifying.  
  
It’s a good thing that it’s opposite day in monster town, because all the sight does is make him want to melt—makes him want to take Axel and keep him forever.  
  
He drowns that part of him, shutting his eyes until he feels the cool rush of darkness beside him.  
  



End file.
